Development and debates

Advocates for proportional representation argue that an election is like a census of opinion as to how the country should be governed, and only if an assembly represents the full diversity of opinion within a country can its decisions be regarded as legitimate. For example, proponents maintain that the plurality system can produce unrepresentative, minority governments, such as in the United Kingdom, where the two major parties governed the country for the last three decades of the 20th century with little more than 40 percent of the votes. The proportional system also is suggested as a means of redressing the possible anomaly arising under majority or plurality systems whereby a party may win more seats with fewer popular votes than its opponents, as occurred in the British elections of 1951 and February 1974.

Critics of proportional representation contend that in an election a country is making a decision, and the function of the electoral system is to achieve a consensus rather than a census of opinion. Opponents argue further that, by making it possible for small parties to be represented, proportional representation encourages the formation of splinter parties that can result in weak and unstable government.

Unlike the plurality system, which uses single-member districts, proportional representation systems use multimember constituencies. Systematic methods of applying proportional representation were first developed in the mid-19th century in Denmark by Carl Andrae and in Britain by Thomas Hare and John Stuart Mill. Methods currently in use include the single-transferable-vote method (STV), the party-list system, and the additional-member system.

Systems of proportionality

Single transferable vote

STV has not been widely adopted, being used in national elections in Ireland and Malta, in Australian Senate elections, and in local and European Parliament elections in Northern Ireland. Under STV, voters rank candidates on the ballot in order of preference. In the 1860s Henry Richmond Droop developed a quota (the so-called Droop quota) to determine the number of votes a candidate needed to capture to win election under STV. The quota is calculated by dividing the total number of valid votes cast by the number of seats to be filled plus one, and one is then added to the quotient, which is expressed in the following formula:Quota = (Total Votes/Total Seats + 1) + 1 For example, if 250,000 votes are cast and 4 seats are to be allocated, the quota would equal 250,000 divided by 5, plus 1, or 50,00l. After the first preference votes are counted, any candidate whose votes exceed the quota is elected. Votes received by successful candidates in excess of the quota are transferred to other candidates according to the voters’ second preferences. Any surplus among subsequently elected candidates is similarly transferred, and so on, if necessary. If any seats are still vacant, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and all his ballots are transferred to the voters’ second preferences, and so on, until all seats are filled. In this way the results reflect fairly accurately the preferences of the electors and, therefore, their support for both individuals and parties. Although the system provides representation to minor parties, results in STV elections generally have shown that minor centrist parties benefit from the system and minor radical parties are penalized. For example, though the Democratic Left (Daonlathas Clé) and Sinn Féin, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, received similar shares of the national vote in the Irish general election of 1997, the more centrist Democratic Left won four seats to the Dáil to Sinn Féin’s one.

Under the party-list system, the elector votes not for a single candidate but for a list of candidates. Each list generally is submitted by a different party, though an individual can put forward his own list. District magnitude (i.e., the number of members per district) varies from country to country; for example, the Netherlands uses a single national district to elect the 150 members of its Tweede Kamer (Second Chamber), and Chile elects members of its legislature by using two-seat constituencies. The overall proportionality of the system is dependent upon the district magnitude, with higher district magnitudes associated with more proportional results. Each party gets a share of the seats proportional to its share of the votes. There are various alternative rules for achieving this; the two principal ones are the largest-remainder rule and the highest-average rule (the latter referred to as the d’Hondt rule, named after Belgian Victor d’Hondt). Under the largest-remainder rule a quota is set, and each party is assigned one seat for each time it meets the quota. These votes are deducted from each party’s total, and when no party has enough votes remaining to meet the quota, the remaining seats are assigned on the basis of whatever votes are left. Under the highest-average rule, seats are assigned one at a time to the party with the highest total. After each seat is assigned, the winning party’s total is adjusted: the original vote total is divided by the number of seats it has won plus one. Although there are variations, the seats that a party wins generally are assigned to its candidates in the order in which they are named in the list.

The additional-member system combines proportionality with the geographic link between a citizen and a member of the legislature characteristic of constituency-based systems. Under this system, adopted by Germany after World War II and in several countries after the fall of communism in eastern Europe, half of the legislature usually is elected through constituency elections and half through proportional representation (the percentage of constituency and proportional representatives varies by country). Each person casts two votes, one for a person and one for a party. In most cases, the party vote is generally used as the basis for determining the overall partisan composition of the legislature.

Trends

During the 1980s and ’90s, electoral-reform movements pressed for changes in voting systems. In Britain proportional representation was adopted for elections to the European Parliament and for some local elections in London and Northern Ireland (though not for elections to the House of Commons). Several other countries—notably Italy, which adopted a modified constituency-based system to reduce the number of political parties in the legislature and to create more stability in the cabinet—have altered their national voting systems.

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